Review of Hard Target 2 (2016) by Kris J — 03 Apr 2017

The movie had very good cinematic level, great camera work, scenes, locations, had good action, and the main villain by Robert Knepper was super well delivered (best performance in this picture, other than I'm a huge fan of Scott) and I couldn't but to notice: It almost could have been a great movie!

If not for the problem of absolutely crappy logic glue holding the scenes together. The big story, fine. But so much illogical unrealistic scenes were forced into the movie for some weird reasons, made it feel like they forced the script like in that game when a teacher gives you a list of words or expressions and you have to write a story that incorporates it: "camel", "vanilla ice cream", "The pen is mightier than the sword", "toothbrush", "The squeaky wheel gets the grease", "propulsion engine". Now go write a great story, just make sure to use all of these words!

If the story was a realistic, believable fiction, then this would be an awesome tribute to the original. The filming had to facilitate a very very poor script (logic wise).

You see, Chance Boudreaux was a war veteran, so you watch him just know some things and you don't ask why he does know all this - well, he's a war veteran. But Wes Baylor is a ring fighter, how on Earth does he know the stuff he knows in the movie? Not any hate towards Scott, but the story is so poorly written.

The Tha and her brother are poor villagers in a middle of jungle yet they are well spoken in English.

The General, LOL, the amount of incredible lack of logic behind what script writers made this character be is just beyond disappointing.

Robert Knepper did really deliver great acting, but even he had to struggle with the fact that script writers got on some insane intoxication when working on the story, like in the sushi scene.

And the character of Sofia was so unrealistic that Rhona Mitra had no chance in saving it. The only way for that character to work would be if it was not played by an action actress like Rhona but a sophisticated drama performer at the level of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, to picture some sort of psychopathic/narcissistic Sofia in a psychological thriller setting.

I just want to add, that I am so disappointed because:

1. The original Hard Target was really a good movie.

2. So would be the Hard Target 2 if only for good writers.

3. I'm a huge Scott's fan and I wish he could work with better scripts.